Extend Open Collective Integration to Any Fiscal Host

[SamirSaidani]

First, I want to express my gratitude for the excellent work on Polar. Your commitment to making it fully open source rather than OpenCore is highly appreciated.

However, one thing holding me back from using Polar is the current limitation with the Open Collective feature, which appears to only support one single fiscal host (see docs "We only support Open Collective accounts using the Open Source Collective fiscal host). Would it be possible to extend this functionality to support any fiscal host? We have a fiscal host on Open Collective, and it would be great to integrate it with Polar. If this isn't feasible, could you please explain the reason for this limitation?

[birkjernstrom]

Hi @SamirSaidani.

Thank you so much for the kind words ♥️ Great to hear you're interested in Polar and really appreciate the desire to support Polar as a fiscal host on Open Collective (OC).

I've reached out to our friends at OC and shared this feature request for us to explore it and if it's possible.

However, I think it might be hard to achieve in the short-term. Reason being that payouts are a manual, monthly and collaborative effort vs. automatically done via an API. So the reason for limiting it to OSC at the moment is because it's part of OC purview which eases payouts vs. a completely separate entity/host which would require completely separate payouts & processes. There might be solutions to this that we can unlock together with OC that I'll explore, but I suspect it might be hard in the short-term.

[SamirSaidani]

I see. Thanks for the detailed answer.

The problem is that we're already a European fiscal host, and adding another layer of complexity by mixing U.S. and EU legal and fiscal regulations with OSC would be too cumbersome. We prefer to maintain full control over the fiscal and legal process. Besides, I'm not sure whether OSC's non-profit setting handles VAT well, considering that our Collective consists of OSS freelancers in a for-profit configuration. I suspect we would encounter the same issues as with GitHub Sponsors, which doesn't handle VAT properly.

Anyway, I believe we need something like OSC within the EU, similar to how Polar operates in the EU by taking care of VAT, so it makes sense to continue exploring this direction.

I'm curious to understand what you need to simplify payouts. What exactly does OSC offer? An API? Is it something we could provide ourselves, or is it locked into the OC infrastructure?